Bank Forgives Programmer Who Withdrew $1M in Cash after Finding ATM Flaw

Qin Qisheng, a senior programmer at Chinese Bank Huaxia, has been jailed for 10 and a half years after taking advantage of "a loophole in the bank's core operating system that meant cash withdrawals made around midnight were not recorded." Mr. Qisheng, who was evidently unhappy with his employer's pay, ultimately managed to collect $1M before he was caught by a manual check. While the bank "accepted his explanation that he had simply been trying to test its internal security and the cash was just resting in his own account before he returned it to his employers," the courts demanded punishment. Qin discovered the flaw in the system in 2016 and in November that year he inserted a few scripts in the banking system which he said would allow him to test the loophole without triggering an alert. For more than a year he made cash withdrawals of between 5,000 yuan and 20,000 yuan (US$740-US$2,965) from a dummy account the bank used to test its systems. By January 2018 he had amassed over seven million yuan - the equivalent of just over a million US dollars - without telling his superiors what he was doing.